The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Content distributors offer access to a variety of media content items, ranging anywhere from user-uploaded media clips to high-quality, subscription-level television shows and movies. Many media content items may be long in playing time. To help consumers find interesting media content items to access, thumbnails of the media content items may be provided for consumers to preview or browse media content items.
Under some approaches, thumbnails may be generated through interactive image annotation processes that rely on relatively intensive manual input from content creators or curators. However, these approaches can be time consuming, error prone and inconsistent, especially where thumbnails need to be generated for numerous media content items from a wide variety of content sources or content providers.
Under some other approaches, representative images may be selected through automatic processes that rely on objective image quality. While the automatic processes may find images with good objective image quality from media content, such images oftentimes still deviate significantly from what content creators or curators would select to represent the media content. As a result, thumbnails generated under these approaches may be of little real interest to media content consumers, but rather may serve to suppress the consumers' interests in accessing the media content.